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Aug 5 2008 11:19AM EDT

'WSJ' Employs Thin Logic on Skinny Obama

The Wall Street Journal is doing a bit of damage control for its featherweight story about whether Barack Obama is "Too Fit to Be President" -- but not quite enough, in my opinion.

The paper published a correction today, saying it should have noted in Friday's story that the reporter, politics-beat writer Amy Chozick, obtained a quote from a "Clinton supporter" by posting a question about Obama on a Yahoo message board, eliciting the response "I won't vote for any beanpole guy."

Score one for transparency. But what I found more egregious was the article's repeated mentions of a day on the campaign trail when the Illinois senator punctuated his schedule with three separate visits to gyms. Chozick references an AP article headlined "Obama Becomes a Gym Rat" -- but fails to note the irony implicit in that headline: The article goes on to say that reporters traveling with Obama suspected him of using workouts as a pretext for meetings with vice presidential candidates or other confidential business. (One giveaway: He showed up at one gym in slacks and a blazer.)

A thought: Maybe a premise that requires a writer to go quote-fishing on the internet and ignore inconvenient counter-evidence to make it work is a premise that's too full of holes to be worth writing?

On the other hand, I don't agree in the least with Slate's Timothy Noah, who argues that Chozick should've known that her article "can't avoid being interpreted as a coded discussion of race." And why is that? Why, because "[w]hen white people are invited to think about Obama's physical appearance, the principal attribute they're likely to dwell on is his dark skin."

By that logic, when GQ's editors salute Obama's sartorial style, or when editorial cartoonists exaggerate his jug-handle ears, or even when I observe (as I did here) that the man is darn easy on the eyes, we're all stoking a racist backlash to his candidacy. I don't buy that any more than I bought the idea that John McCain was race-baiting when he put Paris Hilton and Britney Spears in an attack ad.

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